Hymn Highlight: "Wondrous King, All-Glorious"

A German, Gem of a Hymn that will 'Incite oneself to the praise of God'

It has been a little while since I posted in the “Hymn Highlight” series.¹ Here’s one that you need in your singing repertoire. I first encountered it in the 1961 Blue Trinity Hymnal. #132 is a text and tune by Joachim Neander, who is likely most well-known for the excellent hymn text “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.” As best we can tell, Joachim Neander penned this text and tune in 1680 on Psalm 150:6. I see no other lasting examples of Neander penning both text and tune. The original German text Wunderbarer König has been translated numerous times. This 1938 translation by William J. Schaeffer was printed in the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal and subsequent Trinity hymnals as well. Watch and listen to my Geneva Academy junior/senior musicianship class on the last week of school sing a little of this for you.

Sung Video Examples

This above demonstration was sung in a pleasant 2/2 meter instead of the pedantic 4/4 meter it can get sung in. To put it another way, you group the beats rather than plod through each beat as if it is a whack-a-mole game at an arcade. Here is an example of a more plodding, pedantic version below:

In addition to being a little slower, this version's syllables and beats are equal in delivery. The way to fix this laborious delivery is not simply to “go faster.” You have to change how the song's beats are sung/played. See the screenshot below from a talk I gave this past January on accompanying the congregation in worship. I was trying to highlight how accompanists can avoid the plodding accompaniment and instead keep a good rhythmic style.

Instead of four even beats, you can group them into groups of two beats, as the purple hatched lines demonstrate. That will make the piece more alive and singable by a typical group of folks. In my new Let Joy Resound hymnal, I’ve rescored this into 2/2 meter to help reinforce this idea of a grouping of beats and how that can make things more singable. Below is a PDF of this hymn. My gift to you!

‘Supposed Interest of Solemnity’

“Between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century the psalm tunes were deliberately lengthened out by giving their notes equal length, and singing was slowed down in the supposed interest of solemnity,” writes Henry Wilder Foote.² This is not a good thing, and it has radically changed how people view many of these early hymns and metrical psalm tune settings. They were rhythmic and lively.

Foote says that “it was the vigor and liveliness of a number of the Genevan psalm tunes that led critics to dub them ‘Genevan Jiggs’ or ‘Hopkins his Jiggs.’ To a writer of a century ago, it seemed ‘strange, indeed, that the very tunes that send us to sleep caused our forefathers to dance.’”³ Foote writes that THE OLD HUNDREDTH and other similar psalm settings “became popular with our forefathers because it they were ‘jocund and lively’ where we think of them as ‘solemn and stately, rather than lively.’” As was the case, if you put a millstone on each syllable and beat of any hymn/psalm for too long, then don’t be surprised when most people seek to abandon the old and write new settings of them.

Conclusion

The modern hymn-singing branch of the church would do well to look at singability and rhythmic hymnody treasures like this “Wondrous King, All-Glorious” and make sure we sing it robustly and lively, as demonstrated above in the videos.

Thanks for your patience as I get back into posting a little more regularly than my summer music teaching travels have afforded me. When I’ve not been teaching music, I’ve been working on getting our affairs in order for our Redeemer School of the Arts, which we will be starting in West Monroe, Louisiana, this fall. I’m serving on the board and as acting dean to our incoming class of three music students and two culinary students. Thanks for your prayers and curiosity in this program. We are excited to see what the Lord has for us in this.

1. The subtitle reference to “Incite oneself to the praise of God” was listed in the early version of the hymn and I have included it here.

2. Foote, Henry Wilder. Three Centuries of American Hymnody. United States: Archon Books, 1968, 15.

3. Ibid.